[Freedombox-discuss] Sunday HackFest

[Michiel de Jong]

Hi all,

> trying to hack together an experimental version of the freedombox in a
virtual server image,
> with whoever wants to join in. The starting point will be this:
> http://pagekite.net/community/DebianFB/ [...] and the goals will be this:
> http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/goals/

People are still actively discussing the 7 goals set by the
freedomboxfoundation in the IRC channel, but I have to leave, so as
promised, here is a little round-up email of today's Sunday Hackfest. This
email describes my personal findings, it is not an attempt to reflect
everybody's opinions, nor everything that was said. A better source for that
would be: http://titanpad.com/3LsfCMplSR which was/is the working document
we used and are using. Also, people that were, and still are, in the IRC
channel today, please add any info to this email thread. Also, if you see
anything incorrect here, or biased (as i'm sure is inevitable), please
correct it.

I didn't produce a next snapshot of the virtual machine, because everything
is still in such an exploratory phase. Instead, the product (from my side)
of today's Hackfest would be the following "draft", which more or less in
words describes what should be on the freedombox for it to accomplish its 7
goals:

1) Safe social networking, in which, without losing touch with any of your
friends, you replace Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and other centralized
services with privacy-respecting federated services;

-> I looked into this one. I think many of the open source distributed
social networks out there "replace Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and other
centralized services with privacy-respecting federated services". There is a
choice between xmpp federation and OStatus federation. The tricky part is
"without losing touch with any of your friends", which means an aggregator
for both free and non-free social networks. I looked at diaspora, but their
current solution is not feasible. It relies on registering an api key with
Facebook, and although this makes sense if there are, say, 100 diaspora
nodes in the world, it does not make much sense if there are millions. I
also investigated facebook-notify, which uses OAuth to be a read-client for
facebook. It only displays notifications (not lower-priority news), but I'm
sure it should be possible to write a client that OAuths against facebook to
read and write, much like a twitter client. I will continue to look into
this.


2) Secure backup: Your data automatically stored in encrypted format on the
Freedom Boxes of your friends or associates, thus protecting your personal
data against seizure or loss;

-> this doesn't seem to require much thought. Just a cronned rsync job would
already do the trick. You would have to have a user interface where you
request and allow backups from/to friends that you know from meatspace.
maybe use PGP's WoT, or out-of-band passwords for confirmation. Nobody is
currently actively looking into this.

3) Network neutrality protection: If your ISP starts limiting or interfering
with your access to services in the Net, your Freedom Box can communicate
with your friends to detect and route traffic around the limitations.
Network censorship is automatically routed around, for your friends in
societies with oppressive national firewalls, or for you;

-> i think this can only be done with a wifi mesh. Volunteers for looking
into this?

4) Safe anonymous publication: Friends or associates outside zones of
network censorship can automatically forward information from people within
them, enabling safe, anonymous publication;

-> this is the one we talked most about in #freedombox at irc.oftc.net, i
think. freenet and gnunet were generally considered too young by some. Tor
was highly regarded, but it needs to be combined with some sort of
mirroring. Nobody is currently actively looking into this (although many
people were talking about it).

5) Home network security, with real protection against intrusion and the
security threats aimed at Microsoft Windows or other risky computers your
network;

-> willma is looking into this one, and also into general detection
intrusion and security hardening. Willma indicated that this goal needs some
clarification as to what its author means.

6) Encrypted email, with seamless encryption and decryption;

-> this can easily be done with SquirrelMail. Somebody could experiment with
setting this up, with the automatic PGP key generation and everything.
Volunteers?

7) Private voice communications: Freedom Box users can make
voice-over-Internet phone calls to one another or to any phone. Calls
between Freedom Box users will be encrypted securely;

-> Asterisk has been mentioned. Any volunteers for experimenting with this?


Next week I'll do another Sunday Hackfest with whoever wants to join, and I
think we can make it a regular thing.


Cheers,
Michiel
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